Bill Batty

I’ve taught English at NMH since 1973; I’ve been affiliated with the school for 50 years, since I came here as a student. Choosing my favorite class to teach would be like saying, “Which of your children do you like best?” My approach is to give kids enough room to have their own voice. I had a wonderful Chinese student who handed in his critique at the end of the year. He wrote, “Halfway through the term, I thought, ‘I don’t understand this guy.’ Three-quarters of the way through, I wondered, ‘How come this guy hasn’t been fired?’ By the end of the term, I finally figured it out: Mr. Batty doesn’t want us to be good. He wants us to be great.” He’s absolutely right. I’m not satisfied with kids who do the reading and just give it back. I want kids to really think.

 

My favorite classroom experience happened when we were studying Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Instead of a written test, the students had to recite 20 lines of Shakespeare. One by one, the students recited them perfectly. Then I looked at the board behind me, which was covered with ideograms. The kids had come in early and turned the entire speech into images. They had “To be or not to be” up there, using a bee. It took much more time to do that than to memorize the speech. They turned something that was drudgery into something fun.

 

I’ve taught film studies, and I show a lot of movies in my classes. It can be hard to teach film because there’s a bias against it. I don’t think of film as anything but a genre, the same way I teach novels, poetry, plays, and essays. Why wouldn’t I teach one of the great American art forms? For example, Citizen Kane fits perfectly in a course where we read Macbeth and The Great Gatsby and talk about the nature of tragic heroes. During a recent sabbatical in Paris, I literally saw four movies a day at the Cinémathèque Française.

 

As a teacher, it’s easy to praise the best students and bask in their glory. A great teacher is one who takes every bit as much pleasure in the progress of the kid who’s not a star. What I like about NMH is that the really talented can get pushed, while the offbeat kids, who may be just as smart, can also discover what they want.